Cryotocurrency is like a microcosm of libertarianism in general: it promises to give everybody more freedom, but it really only benefits the rich by turning the economy based on it into an unregulated winner-take-all battle royale. And it fucks over the environment in the process.
It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#762I think the only point of value for crypto currencies is enabling the purchase of drugs online, and don't get me wrong, being able to escape the terrible effects of prohibition is a very useful thing. Anyone who has tried will tell you how much better ( by any metric ) buying digitally is to the alternatives.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which ones?
Avalanche, cosmos/tendermint, ethereum, mina, celo, dfinity, axelar, etc.
I've studied some of these, in varying depth. But it honestly seems like we've built a tremendous amount of impressive technology that currently has very little impact outside of its own ecosystem, in terms of enabling new industries or consumer services.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "early internet" comparison is usually presented when talking about how clumsy and slow the technology is in its current state. The argument is certainly not presented in the context of how "fun" it is. There's nothing "fun" about finance (and there never will be). In the context of technological state (how brittle and obtuse the tools are), the comparison between the two is right on the money IMHO. I once config…
Nerds, early adopters — whatever you want to call them, the online behaviors they pioneered became mainstream. In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All proposed applications are self-referential shell games like NFTs, staking schemes, etc. If this is a superior platform for finance, where’s the real economic activity? Handwaving about “prob…
To answer your last question first, crypto clearly is a superior platform for finance, exactly because of the explosion in "self-referential shell games" - it's in fact an extreme democratizer of "finance" - anyone can create their own liquidity pools, it's trivial to create not just CDOs, but CDO2s, 3s 4s, and they all run 24/7 forever. (no, this does not have much relevance to "real" economic activity, but this is true of almost all financialization and the more people that people understand that the better, IMO)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy
Now for some of the more useful/interesting stuff I've seen:
Gitcoin has been pioneering Quadratic Funding for open source projects for some time now: https://github.com/gitcoinco/quadratic-funding
They recent launched a governance token and DAO (many other projects have been experimenting with various types of on-chain governance models).
Both of these pursuits are widely applicable for creating sustainable models for funding and managing distributed common good projects.
Brave has over 25M active users and has built a model on their token to pay website users and creators for ads, as well as allow in-browser tipping, etc.
Many DeFi projects are experimenting with various novel forms of tokenomics (hold X tokens to access Y features; yield earned w/ Z tokens accrue to the developers) which are interesting alternatives for creating sustainable development/operational models for software.
There are projects that are doing interesting work bridging digital and physical assets (particularly in harmonizing the legal mechanisms for property) like Mattereum, but I'd argue even the simplest types of digital-only tokenization become interesting when it can be made composable with other dapps (eg, fractional ownership of projects that can later be made liquid on the open market or that can be collateralized). This ties back to the domain of not just coordinating, but incentivizing distributed collaboration/human resources.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just an overly simplistic summary of the whole thread. Pinboard isn't angry about artificial scarcity, but how cryptocurrency fails to fulfill its promises: it fails to decentralize, it fails to reach performance levels of existing financial institutions, it wastes huge amounts of energy, and it provides zero value other than being a ransomware enabler. (Disclaimer: I own cryptocurrency)
And he is wrong. Plenty of cryptocurrencies are fast, with low fees, and with minimal energy consumption.
Yes but not the overwhelmingly popular ones.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#766In the meantime the US prints 6 trillion dollars out of thin air - which seems at least as fraudulent as some crypto projects.
I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin brings us back to a currency backed by gold or something similarly strong, or better.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#767Hacker news is holistically anti cryptocurrency. Which disappoints me. It has virtues. As someone who works in applied Cryptography and has also worked for the European Central Bank, we need “crypto”. 1) seigniorage is an abused privilege. Source: US debt ceiling at 27TRN. 2) permissionless money has value, I cannot send more than 5k a day using my bank. I can send any amount using crypto. I also don’t need two utili…
> it’s censorship resistant. Govt’s can’t just stop payments or shutdown the network. If they have a firewall, they could block the majority of exchanges, wallet apps, and even ips of some of the largest mining groups.
>If they have a firewall, they could block the majority of exchanges, wallet apps, and even ips of some of the largest mining groups.
Unless they have something as complex and comprehensive as China's firewall, they couldn't, because the protocol could just route around it.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#768These two resonated with me: > A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out > [non-tech people] don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us It is o…
> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens. I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded s…
Ah yes, Iota, which uses ternary internally because it's the "superior technological solution" and "the future of computing".
https://iota.stackexchange.com/questions/8/why-does-iota-use...
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
That limit sounds low, e.g. Chase Bank allows wire transfers out of $100,000 per day for individuals.
I have sent large amounts all over the place. As for pretending to be anonymous and outside of society, I have no use for that. The issue of crypto currency, besides the resource impact, is the evil that comes from trying to destroy democratic government.
>The issue of crypto currency, besides the resource impact, is the evil that comes from trying to destroy democratic government.
The evil of democratic government (as opposed to a strong republic) is that that 51% can vote to rob the 49% of everything they own. Crypto prevents this.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#770I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make it clear the emperor has no clothes here. _Gold_ is sustained by a mix of money laundering, human slavery, fraud, ransom, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast. What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the claims of _gold_ and our now thousands of years of expe…
May I humbly suggest replacing
> because it's full of cleverness
with
> because it's shiny